Due to reconfiguration of this site, the links the Anchoress uses in her post 100 Hours after Katrina are no longer valid. Here are the correct links:

Poop About Pumps: http://northshorejournal.org/katrina-poop-about-pumps

Private American aid: http://northshorejournal.org/ameraid/ameraidamer.html

Other Countries Offer Help: http://northshorejournal.org/katrina-other-countries-offer-help

The latest update is posted for Americans Aiding Americans.

I’m feeling so much better since the hospitalization. Either I really, really needed the two weeks of enforced rest, or the antibiotics knocked out something nasty that had been dragging me down since June. Anyway, lots of energy now, and I can get back to the list.

Are Americans burning out? Lots of commentary to that effect because we’ve not donated a ton of money for the relief efforts for the earthquake in South Asia. I’d like to think we’re taking care of our own first.

The United Way is bitching nationwide about the effects the tsunami effort and the hurricane effort is having on its fundraising efforts. How about you cut your overhead, by say half, that should make it easier to provide funds to the member agencies. Oh, yeah, and make people trust you again.

Local fundraising efforts far too numerous to document continue, and hurricane relief efforts continue to gain a thousand dollars here and another thousand there. I’m talking hundreds of efforts each week. Schools and churches, concerts, can drives. It’s truly amazing. The Clear Channel family of media have done an outstanding job, just to pick one item.

How can I help with the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita?

Two ways. First, give to charity, one run by your church, or to the Red Cross or Salvation Army. Give what you can, and a dollar more. Secondly, participate in the Pork Busters project.

This project is an effort by bloggers to identify programs and grants in the Federal budget that can be cut to help pay for hurricane relief. The link at the logo will take you to a variety of pages detailing what is being done. It’s important to follow up with your congressman and Senators, more than once, and to make Pork Busting a priority. Simply freezing discretionary spending for two years would go a long way to both pay for the recovery and to balance the budget. Remember, taxes are your money and Congress consists of your employees. It’s more than OK to ask them to account for what they do with your money.

DoD

When you see me up here in uniform and I talk about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, there are really two Corps of Engineers. One is the branch of the Army, and that branch as about 80,000 soldiers which are active Guard and Reserve, and then you have a major command of the Army called the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is what I command. And that is comprised of 34,000 people. All but about 500 are civilians, career civilians, in all fields of endeavor. So when we talk about the Corps of Engineers response here, it’s mainly those people that I’m talking about. So in the past you’ve seen me as a military officer and I refer to, well, that’s what the military’s doing, that was some of the confusion in previous occasions when I’ve spoken with you. So that’s who I am and what we do.

We have standing missions in civil works. We’re responsible principally for the nation’s water resources. We do inland and deep draft navigation. We do flood control, hydroelectric generation, a lot of recreation, and a lot of things in the civil community. And those skills then come to bear when we respond to disaster. We also have a large military construction mission, which is worldwide, where we support military forces and provide the facilities they need for training and readiness.

In terms of our response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, again we’re doing three ways: direct support to FEMA; we’re in support of the Department of Defense response, which is also in support of FEMA; and we’re doing our inherent mission responsibilities mainly related to flood control and navigation.

Where FEMA is concerned we are responding as part of the National Response Plan, which is based on the old Federal Response Plan, which used to be just directed at response to natural disaster. With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and putting FEMA under the department, they’ve broadened the response plan to include response to terrorist attacks with the idea that the cause of the catastrophe, while important, is not really relevant in terms of our response. Because what you have is the same results: you have displaced people in need of food and water and shelter and medical attention and all those things. And so FEMA now responds to — regardless of the nature of the incident — responds in pretty much the same way, and that’s the theory behind the National Response Plan.

We are responsible for what is called Emergency Support Function 3, which is ESF3; that’s public works. There are 15 of these ESFs and — for which different branches — or different departments have responsibility. Under that, we have missions to provide the bulk ice and water. We provide temporary power, temporary roofing, debris removal, which is our biggest mission in this one. We’re doing technical assistance, and we’re responsible for inter-agency coordination of infrastructure requirements in the response and recovery. We also do special missions like the un-watering of New Orleans that I’m sure you’re very familiar with.

In terms of support to the Department of Defense, it’s mainly through staff augmentation. Both the Joint Task Force has stood up in response to Hurricane Katrina under General Honore, and the similar one that stood up under General Clark from Fifth Army to respond to Rita. Both of those had personnel from the Corps of Engineers; general officers who are in command of our divisions that went forward to become the engineer and took with them military and civilian staff members to help coordinate the activities of military forces — federal military forces that were responding. Air Force, Navy, Marines and sea — and Army Engineers were out there responding to the disaster.

In terms of our own inherent missions, there’s a public law called 8499, which gives us authority to do flood fighting without doing it under FEMA control, without being directed to do so, because we have a responsibility in those instances. So we are now using those authorities to respond to this, and that mainly takes the form of doing the actual flood fights during the emergency and then repairing the systems back to their original configuration following the emergency. We use these funds to do that.

The other big mission is restoration of navigation. And we’ve now had two very successful occasions to get involved in that, first under Katrina and then under Rita. And in both cases we’ve worked very closely with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to do surveys of the ports and channels, and with the Coast Guard to restore navigation aids. And then, where necessary to move obstructions or shoaling, the Corps of Engineers goes in and takes care of that mission. So we’ve done that in both cases.

One of the more challenging aspects of Rita for us has been the response to — the need to respond to power requirements. There was some significant damage to the fixed power production in Texas and so there’s been a very heavy reliance on temporary generation. We’re talking fairly significant generators here. We’re not talking little Honda things; we’re talking generators that can power up whole hospitals or administrative facilities. So generation has been a big role here.

We also had a significant roofing mission in Katrina — I mean in Rita, much like in Katrina. Right now we’re looking at — we estimate about 70,000 roofs in Louisiana and about 35,000 in Mississippi, and about 5,000 in Texas. So a big mission to go in and allow people to reoccupy their homes until they can put permanent repairs in place. This is critical to solving some of the housing shortages we see, is to put people back where they live.

The debris mission is also one of the most significant ones for us. Right now we estimate that we have somewhere between 40 (million) and 70 million cubic yards of debris to move. And again, to put that in perspective, if you can all remember Hurricane Andrew, about 18 million yards of debris then, and it took about nine months to clean up. So this is a huge effort on this. The range there has to do with whether or not we do removal of private debris. Typically we just remove debris from public rights of way, and we will take private citizens’ debris when they bring it to those rights of way. That’s about 40,000 (sic/40 million) cubic yards of debris. If we get involved in demolition and removal of residential and structural debris, then it could go up to 70 million cubic yards. We have been very successful so far. We’ve moved about 8 million cubic yards in the last 30 days. Again, think back to Andrew, 18 million, nine months. We’ve moved 8 million in 30 days here. And the reason we were able to do that is we put very large contracts in place and we surged on this mission because it really is the way that we set the conditions for recovery by getting people access back into their homes and towns and allowing the recovery to begin to take place. So debris has been a big part of this mission.

Associated with that — well, before I get into that piece, the other things we’re doing right now that are related to our inherent responsibilities are conducting project condition surveys. And we do this for a couple of reasons. First of all, we need to put the projects back in their condition that they were pre-landfall, and so we got to go out and figure out what needs to be done there and then make those needs known to Congress and the administration for resourcing.

But the second is, we also need to make sure the decision-makers are aware of the level of risk associated with the condition of the projects, especially our flood and hurricane protection projects. And as you know, Mayor Nagin, in his decision on when and how to reoccupy the city of New Orleans, has to understand those risks. And we characterize the risk to the citizens of New Orleans in two ways. First of all, risk to normal rain events because the city’s pumps which normally pump down the rainwater are at significantly reduced capacity. So, for example, in central New Orleans, the pumps are only operating at about 40 percent capacity, so it’s conceivable if you get a prolonged rain event you could get another six feet of water back in there that the pumps simply can’t contend with.

The other risk has to do with the integrity of the levee systems around New Orleans. We saw that in Hurricane Rita we had some overtopping of the repairs that we made following Katrina. We anticipated a storm surge of anywhere from three to six feet in Lake Ponchartrain, and in the Inner Harbor part of the city we got about eight feet of storm surge. So we were not prepared for that, so we saw elements of St. Bernard’s Parish, specifically the Ninth Ward, got re-flooded during Rita.

Let me close by just talking a little bit about contracting, because I know there’s a lot of interest about that. We have used, in some cases, sole-source contracts, but I would say that that is — only as a last resort and only with full justification do we do that.

The federal acquisition regulations allow you to use sole- sourcing in emergency situations. We certainly faced that in the early days. And we did a number of both small business and large business sole-source contracts to get things going. Since that time, though, all of our contracts have been competitive. And we are trying very hard to create opportunities for small and local business, so that we can stimulate the economy in the impacted areas.

One of the most notable areas I mentioned earlier was the debris, about a $2 billion mission assignment from FEMA to do that. We have given all of our debris contracts so far to large businesses, because we face that tension of a rapid response and getting things going quickly, which you can do with large firms that can mobilize and bring resources to bear very quickly, versus the need to stimulate the economy through use of small and local businesses. A small and local would require the more dispersed effort on our part and would have been much more difficult to get the kind of traction we’ve gotten on the debris effort. So unfortunately, we have given out $2 million of capacity in the — or $2 billion worth of capacity in debris contracts.

I want to underscore the word “capacity.” What we do is, we advertise these. We had 22 contractors that bid on these. We found 17 to be acceptable, and we awarded to four. We awarded four $500 million capacity contracts, and we will start then issuing task orders against those. At the same time, though, we’ll be looking for opportunities, now that the crisis is largely past, to create opportunities in debris and roofing and other areas for small and local business to get involved.

First of all, why not go to cat 5. The principal thing is authorities. We must have authority to do that. We must be directed through legislation to put that level of protection in. So that’s the first thing that’s necessary. We have been studying the feasibility of a category 5 protection for a number of years. In 1999 we were directed to begin that study. We do a thing called a reconnaissance study, and essentially that’s a study to look at whether or not it would be feasible to provide level 5 protection to the city. And a very important aspect of that is whether there’s a federal interest in doing so, because the federal government does not get involved unless there’s a federal interest. And all of these projects are done with a local sponsor who provides a cost share.

The levee system we’re talking about here — and it’s mainly — well, there are a number of projects here. Most of the levees you see depicted here are part of the Lake Ponchetrain hurricane protection system, funded 70 federal, 30 percent local. And once we build the thing, we turn it over to the locals for ownership, operation and maintenance. So part of it is the authority to go to category 5. That reconnaissance study indicated it was feasible, and there is a federal interest. The next step is to go to a feasibility study, where you begin to get into detailed planning. This, again, is cost-shared. Reconnaissance is all federal; feasibility is 50-50 cost share, and the cost of that study is probably about $12 million to get that study complete. So that’s the next step, would be to move into that phase with the local sponsor. And I’m sure there will be a lot of interest in moving that ahead as quickly as we can.

I really don’t have any intuitive response to that, except to say that we know that down in here — this is St. Bernard’s Parish here — that the levees back here were clearly overtopped, overtopped by a storm surge coming out of Lake Borgne. We saw the same thing further to the south in Plaquemines Parish. Breton Sound, we think the storm surge coming out of there caused the overtopping of those levees.

Up here in Lake Ponchatrain, we’re not sure whether it was overtopping or whether it was simply the hydraulic impact there. And the thing that we’re really looking at here of interest is that you have flood walls all along the lake front here. The flood walls that breached were in these canals in narrow areas. So perhaps there’s something associated with the hydraulic activity inside those narrow canals, and that’s what we’re really focusing our efforts on here at the 17th, here in the London Avenue, and also in the inner harbor of New Orleans. And here we have the Missouri River Gulf Outlet which could have forced waters into here. We have a Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, and then we have a navigation channel coming out of the lake here. So we’re going to look at how that water moved in there, what impact that might have had on the structure.

How can I help with the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita?

Two ways. First, give to charity, one run by your church, or to the Red Cross or Salvation Army. Give what you can, and a dollar more. Secondly, participate in the Pork Busters project.

This project is an effort by bloggers to identify programs and grants in the Federal budget that can be cut to help pay for hurricane relief. The link at the logo will take you to a variety of pages detailing what is being done. It’s important to follow up with your congressman and Senators, more than once, and to make Pork Busting a priority. Simply freezing discretionary spending for two years would go a long way to both pay for the recovery and to balance the budget. Remember, taxes are your money and Congress consists of your employees. It’s more than OK to ask them to account for what they do with your money.

New numbers at the left. Actual results are at least $100 mil higher. Unlike the tsunami relief effort, there are fewer updates on fundraising being posted by various charities.

How can I help with the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita?

Two ways. First, give to charity, one run by your church, or to the Red Cross or Salvation Army. Give what you can, and a dollar more. Secondly, participate in the Pork Busters project.

This project is an effort by bloggers to identify programs and grants in the Federal budget that can be cut to help pay for hurricane relief. The link at the logo will take you to a variety of pages detailing what is being done. It’s important to follow up with your congressman and Senators, more than once, and to make Pork Busting a priority. Simply freezing discretionary spending for two years would go a long way to both pay for the recovery and to balance the budget. Remember, taxes are your money and Congress consists of your employees. It’s more than OK to ask them to account for what they do with your money.